Red Chicago (review)

Throughout the twentieth century, a specter haunted the United States. American politicians and lawmen repeatedly issued stern warnings to the nation about sinister plots devised in Moscow and executed by the Kremlin's agents in the US. Herbert Hoover's Revolution in Action (1920), J. Edgar Hoover's Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (1958) and Ronald Reagan's so-called "Evil Empire Speech" (1983) recognize dangerous, unthinking—"monolithic"—Communist threats as much as they reveal the daunting, un-American possibilities embedded within Communist ideology. Red Chicago: American Communism and its Grassroots, 1928-35 provides an opportunity for readers to reconsider a set of notions about the structure/ function relationship between the Communist Party and American Communists that established foundations of 20th-century American politics and culture.

With Red Chicago Randi Storch delivers an account of American Communist Party activity in Chicago during the Party's "Third Period." Coinciding with the beginning of the Great Depression and extending to the Popular Front-era of 1935-1939, the Third Period, according to Storch, is "thought to be the most sectarian party history" and regarded as a moment in which "Soviet inspired tactics lent themselves to ultra-revolutionary rhetoric and behavior that alienated American workers." For American Communists organizing in Chicago at this time, however, consistent engagement with diverse populations and dynamic political conditions required them to "move away from the sectarianism in all of their major campaigns before order to do these things arrived from Moscow" (2).

By examining this process, Storch's study seeks to "reorient the story of American Communism." To navigate the blunt edges of the Third Period's Stalinist hard line, Storch responds to what she describes as "more concrete questions" concerned with organizing efforts in Chicago, including: "Who were Chicago's Communists? How, when and why did they implement Third Period policy? What did they actually do in the city's neighborhoods and industries? How did they interpret the party line? When and why did they reinterpret it?" (4) Red Chicago goes a long way toward answering these questions, particularly by making use of documents held by The Russian State Archive of Social and Political History. Drawing upon materials from this archive, this social history and community study helps to "put a human face on American Communism" by allowing readers to consider the kinds of "places and personal and political choices Communist activists made into the social and political context in which they lived" (5).

In Red Chicago the lives, faces, places and voices emerge from Chicago's widely divergent cultural and political landscape. It finds Third Period Communists active and involved in workers' struggle to organize in the stockyards as well as the steel mills. Storch's study brings attention to party efforts to organize homeless men sheltered in Westside flophouses and prevent evictions of African American families on the Southside. Over the course of the text, readers also see activists at work in meetings of the John Reed Club and in the pages of various ethnic language newspapers. In this way Red Chicago documents strategies and reasoning informing the full range of party organizing efforts and activities undertaken in one American city during the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. At the same time it contributes to the effort to examine and perhaps revaluate the impact that the American Communist Party had upon and within the political landscape of the United States.